Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
17 July 2025 — Next week, on 22 and 23 July 2025, the High Court of Justice in London will hear the Wikimedia Foundation’s legal challenge to the Categorisation Regulations of the United Kingdom (UK)’s Online Safety Act (OSA).
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, announced its legal challenge earlier this year, arguing that the regulations endanger Wikipedia and the global community of volunteer contributors who create the information on the site.
“The Court has an opportunity in this case to set a global precedent for protecting public interest projects online,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the internet. It’s the only top-ten website operated by a non-profit and one of the highest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models (LLMs). We trust the Court will protect Wikipedia—a vital encyclopedic resource—from rules crafted for the internet’s riskiest commercial sites and, in doing so, safeguard the open internet for everyone”.
Information on Wikipedia is written and curated by a global community of nearly 260,000 volunteer contributors. These volunteers set and enforce policies to ensure that information on the platform is fact-based, neutral, and attributed to reliable sources. Over the last 25 years, this human-centered content moderation model has established Wikipedia as an unparalleled resource for reliable information in over 300 languages; its 65 million articles are viewed more than 15 billion times per month worldwide.
